Eyes of the World Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and the Invention of Modern Photojournalism

by Desconhecido

  In fact, the woman was not looking up at German bombers—she was part of a crowd listening to a land-reform speech and had caught sight of government airplanes. And yet that image of heads craned with worried eyes contrasted against the German bomb and airplanes does speak to real conditions. The Spanish people are living under a vicious aerial bombing. “What was new and prophetic about the war in Spain,” the American war correspondent Martha Gellhorn notes, “was the life of the civilians, who stayed at home and had war brought to them.” These photographs and layouts are being used to make symbolic points, to get at a deeper truth.

  In Europe, people are eager for news that brings them right into the action. So a photo spread by Capa is seen by millions. His celebrity status, his impact as a photographer, is instantaneous. In November, the publisher of Time magazine, Henry Luce, begins a new American publication—Life magazine—fash-ioned after Vu. The first issue sells nearly half a million copies within hours of being put on the newsstands. The spreads in Life magazine do not make use of slanted angles; they tend to display the photos in a more straightforward manner. But the magazine does tell a story in pictures, flowing like a film from page to page. And the American public is devouring these images just as fast as their European counterparts.

  In these few months, the age of modern photojournalism and war photography is born. Capa and Taro, along with Chim and others, are its creators. They are inventing a form that is utterly new. They are feeding news images that swiftly spread and can have a powerful impact on people all over the world. With this new revolutionary way of seeing, they are doing whatever they can to change hearts and minds. If governments won’t listen, they seem to be saying, maybe readers can be persuaded by seeing the story with their own eyes.

  The cover of a publication meant to alert people about the fascist assault on Madrid uses Chim’s photo in an arresting collage.

  This spread shows Capa’s shots of the initial stages of the Battle of Teruel and uses juxtaposition to keep the eye moving. Rather than avoid the gutter in the middle of the page, a central image and headline command the center. Looking over the spread, the reader feels the disjunction and motion of fight and flight.

  The crowds in the Soviet Union and in Barcelona are linked in this Regards spread celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The circles connected by the line itself echo some of the imagery used in Soviet magazines.

  A heartbreaking picture, shot by Capa in February 1937, shows a refugee woman from Málagataking shelter in Almería.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  TOGETHER IN RUINS

  JANUARY—FEBRUARY 1937

  “A RACE AGAINST DEATH”

  By the time Capa and Taro arrive in Málaga later in February, the worst of the fighting is over. Once again, they’ve missed the main battle action.

  Perched on the Mediterranean and guarded by a medieval castle and fortress, Málaga has endured many an assault. It was one of the last cities in Spain that the Muslim rulers held on to before they were pushed out by the Christian forces in 1492. But the attack in January 1937 is nothing like what Málaga—and the world—has ever seen.

  On January 17, Franco’s troops begin a two-pronged assault on the city, which easily falls by February 8. There is only one way out—a narrow single-lane road that hugs the bottom of the coastal mountains. Málaga’s residents flee in what journalist Claud Cockburn calls “a race against death.” Trapped between the thrust of mountains and a steep cliff edge, the frantic refugees are strafed by machine-gun fire from low-flying German and Italian planes.

  An ambulance driver describes “seventy miles of people desperate with hunger and exhaustion, and still the streams showed no signs of diminishing. . . . The sides of the road, the rocks, and the shore were dotted with the refugees, pressed down on their faces burrowing into holes. Children lay flat, with one frightened eye turned upwards towards the sky. . . . Huddled groups crouched everywhere, mothers already on the brink of exhaustion, held down their children, pushing them into every cranny and hollow, flattening themselves into the hard earth, while the planes droned nearer.”

  Capa and Taro make their way up the coast to a shelter in Almería. Though Taro has been away from Spain for a few months, she quickly finds her focus. Inside the crowded rooms, she and Capa move among the squalling children and the stunned families sitting on their rolled-up mattresses, looking dazedly around them. She takes a picture of a sleeping child, half-undressed with legs bandaged, and a man in a beret leaning against a wall, cradling his toddler, whose head is swathed in a stained bandage.

  At some point, both Capa and Taro home in on the same woman: a refugee mother who stands, face against one hand, while her children crouch and cling to her apron. A shell-shocked man—her husband, perhaps—rests beside her, staring into air. What a contrast to the couple relaxing in the Barcelona sun that Capa and Taro had each photographed back in August. Here the woman is caught in a moment of grief and shock, trying to be a pillar for her family but unable to make sense of what has just happened or to imagine what may come next. Like Capa’s photos from Madrid, these images will be plastered across spreads in publications all over Europe. The photo of the mother and her children appears on the cover of a German magazine and will be reused many times to show the impact of war.

  CAPA AND TARO easily find their rhythm once again as partners and as photographers. He is in love with her, and so as his reputation soars, he tries to make sure that she does not feel she is falling behind. Capa tries to nurture Taro’s career by presenting her with two perfect gifts. First, he gives her his Leica camera. This means Taro can give up her Reflex-Korelle and have greater freedom in taking action shots. Capa has begun using a new, even faster 35 mm Contax.

  This photo of the same family was taken by Taro and wound up on the cover of a German magazine.

  Capa’s second gift is a rubber stamp reading REPORTAGE CAPA & TARO. Now the stories they cover together can carry both of their names. Capa may be using his rising fame to give her an opening. Yes, he is the more established photographer, but he sees them as an ongoing couple, a team, and this stamp binds them professionally. If they both shoot the same story, they are collaborating, not competing.

  The stamp Capa created, used on the back of a photo of a funeral (see page 161).

  Taro’s feelings are probably more complicated. She has the uneasy sense that Capa has surpassed her. At the same time, they are good together. How to balance their own individual ambitions with their togetherness?

  Capa, Taro, and Chim are not always possessive about receiving name credit for their pictures. They keep notebooks, where they paste the prints, so the editors can get a sense of the stories they are following. But they also know their images will be cut up, used, and reassembled in different ways for magazine spreads. Magazines sometimes give credit; sometimes they don’t. As new photographers breaking into the business, Capa and Taro understand that getting credit for a picture is important, for it will help their reputation, which means more assignments and influence with editors. Still, Capa, Taro, and Chim also see themselves as reporters, part of a larger cause—the fight against fascism. They are soldiers in the war of images.

  Their partnership is an extension of the world they are in—exiles who must rely upon one another to survive, journalists who help each other out in covering war. Similarly, while Capa and Chim are both photographing in Spain, there seems to be little competition between the two men. They are so different temperamentally that respect replaces either ego or envy. The quiet and fastidious Chim is never begrudging or competitive toward his younger, less experienced counterparts. Given the difference in Capa’s and Chim’s personalities, they each have something to offer in their development as photographers. Capa urges the shy Chim to move closer to the action, whereas Chim teaches Capa to approach his subjects with greater tenderness. All three understand that they are dividing up the story of Spain, offering different angles and approaches. This sense of commo
n purpose was born in those Paris café years, when everyone was hungry and hustling for work, and they knew their survival depended on sharing.

  Taro, with a Leica slung around her neck, can be seen at the edge of this image, taken by Capa in Feburary 1937 at the front line in University City.

  A battered chair in the glancing February light—Taro’s image of abandonment in Madrid’s ruins.

  In one sense, all the journalists in Spain are rivals, trying to get the story, the next scoop. But they are also deeply dependent on one another for information. They form a network of like-minded allies. Sometimes they need a hand to find cigarettes or to land a spot to flop for a night. Other times they need to ask for crucial names, contacts, information on where the most important battle is being fought. In the midst of war, other journalists are family; everyone is marooned on an island of conflict, surrounded by fast-moving events.

  In this atmosphere of camaraderie, Taro is able to be an equal, a partner, another journalist making it up as she goes along. And there is a deeper feeling in Taro, Capa, and Chim—the conviction that they are on the cusp of history, witnessing events that could have immense consequences for the rest of the world. The simmering egos, their hurts and resentments, must be put aside to get this story right.

  FEBRUARY 1937, THE SURREAL CITY

  “Of all the places to be in the world, Madrid is . . . the hub of the universe,” says New York Times correspondent Herbert Matthews, “for the immediate fate of this world is being settled right here.”

  Taro and Capa arrive in Madrid in the third week of February, joining the other journalists who nightly flock to the basement restaurant of the Hotel Gran Vía, with its pink lights, watery soup, beans, and stale bread. Now he is Capa, the seasoned photographer, returning. Eyes twinkling, he loves telling tales of his exploits in University City—with some embellishments. And he’s much liked. His resourcefulness, learned during those lean years in Paris when he was constantly hustling for work, is a wonderful trait for a war photographer. When no one has wine or cigarettes, Capa can magically produce them. “He seemed to be able to get almost anything under any circumstances,” Gustav Regler will recall.

  Taro holds her own next to the gregarious Capa. It does not take long for the two photographers to be seen as a charmed and special couple: “Their faces glowed with their love of danger, the joy of immortal youth. They were dynamic, courageous, perhaps unconsciously so, but firm and irresistible,” the poet Rafael Alberti and his wife, María Teresa León, both notice.

  Capa and Taro don’t linger at the hotel. They are here to get pictures. Immediately Capa introduces Taro to the same sites in University City that he’d photographed in the heat of battle. Now the troops have settled into the weary work of manning a front line. Soldiers are hunkered down in deep trenches, serving as sentries next to walls of stacked sandbags or trying to stay warm in bunkers that look like caves. They huddle under wool blankets; sometimes they break up the tense waiting by playing a game of tennis on a street. These are not the moody action scenes that Capa captured before but the tired resignation of troops who are in for the long haul.

  Facades sheared off in the bombings reveal lives left behind—a dining room sideboard, a chair, and a portrait. Early 1937 photo by Capa.

  We can imagine Taro and Capa during this time, roaming the city. She wears her long raincoat, a beret, sometimes stockings and heels. Now, as they go from site to site, she is getting used to the Leica, grasping the tiny device by both hands, learning how to raise it to her eye and shoot, rather than peering down into the viewfinder of the boxlike Reflex-Korelle. Capa and Taro are in sync, sometimes taking shots of the same scene. Her images tend toward artful composition. When they shoot a regiment of troops, she stands farther back so that the men form long diagonal lines, slashing across the scene. Capa moves in closer, crouching on the ground, cutting off legs so the soldiers seem to be marching right toward the viewer.

  Do they talk about these choices? Discuss how to shoot a scene? Does Capa give her advice on the Leica? We cannot know. But the paired shots suggest how comfortable they are with each other and with their differences as fellow photographers. We can imagine the reassurance, the sustenance, they each feel knowing the other is capturing the scene before them in a different way, with a distinct style and eye. No one taught them how to shoot as a team. Collaboration, working in tandem, seems to come naturally to them.

  Capa records a building shorn of its front, sliced open by repeated bombings.

  Capa records what remains of an apartment whose front has been destroyed in the bombing.

  Under chilly gray skies, they move on, venturing into the ravaged parts of the city, where the bombing has been the worst. These neighborhoods are abandoned, virtually ghost towns. There’s a quiet stillness to the work they produce during this time. Their photographs reflect a sense of shock at what they see: a city shorn, emptied out, ruined.

  Let’s stop here, we can imagine them saying. They are absorbed, picking through the broken rooms, fascinated by a rocking chair left in a corner. It is as if they are all alone in the world, only the two of them, the sound of wind scouring the blasted streets. Shutters bang. Dust floats up from the ground.

  Some of their most haunting images are of the buildings themselves, destroyed in air raids: mere facades, windows that open to nothing. Here, both Taro and Capa often crouch on the ground and shoot, as if to reinforce what these bombardments felt like to the residents. A lone telephone pole slants downward on a rubbled street. A horse, unhitched from its wagon, grazes on the scruffy grass that pokes up from broken pavement. In an abandoned room, a photograph of what could be a mother and daughter in frilly clothes stares out from a wall of paper, a cabinet’s doors open and drawers coated in plaster dust. So many lives upended, gone, disappeared.

  “Surrealism,” they write in their notebook—the city reminds them of the art of nightmare, séance, and dream created by painters such as Salvador Dalí. Their work in Madrid is one of the few moments when one senses that they paused and absorbed the shock of the ruined city.

  In Madrid, the destruction of war is commonplace. As the reporter Martha Gellhorn describes it, “You could see people around Madrid examining the new shell holes with curiosity and wonder. Otherwise they went on with the routine of their lives, as if they had been interrupted by a heavy rainstorm but nothing more.”

  Walking in Madrid, the American journalist Virginia Cowles noted, “At the end of the avenue the streets grew desolate and blocks of houses were gutted and empty. Some . . . looked like stage sets with whole fronts ripped off.” Photograph by Capa.

  WHILE BASED IN MADRID, Capa learns that a newly formed newspaper, Ce Soir, wants to offer him a bona fide job as a correspondent, with a salary. Taro will also get assignments, as will Chim. Ce Soir is run by the Communist Party, though it is seeking contributors who are not necessarily party members but supportive of the leftist cause. Capa and Taro discuss the opportunity. Finally they could have that elusive stability and income, yet they do not want to be beholden to just one publi-cation. They want to be free to sell their images elsewhere, too. Eager to settle their business, Capa leaves for Paris at the beginning of March. Taro stays behind.

  Taro frames a shot with her Leica. This photo, taken in July 1937, is the best image of her as a photographer in action.

  CHAPTER NINE

  GERDA ALONE

  MARCH 1937

  WHO CAN SAY what happens between a young man and a woman when they are everything to each other—artistic collaborators, lovers, business partners? What is the connection when they push each other to grave risk and yet also try to protect each other from danger? What changes between them when their fortunes start to shift, and they go from being penniless and hungry refugees to increasingly successful photojournalists?

  Capa is nothing like the despon-dent, moody young man who once wrote to Taro from Spain, desperately insecure about his work. Not only does he have money in his pocket, he
has newfound confidence. Capa has always had something of the braggart, the gambler, mixed with a rueful self-irony.

  Capa rides the swells of emotion, action, impulse. This is partly what makes him such a dynamic photographer: he moves into the scene, clicking away, as if responding by pure instinct to the pulse of action. Taro has always been the steadier, clearer one. “She was more realistic than he and saw things with a cooler head, and thought more than the emotional Capa,” Gerda’s friend Ruth Cerf would say.

  This press pass issued to Taro gave her standing as a professional journalist.

  As Capa establishes himself, he sees Taro in his future with everything in their life as mingled as the stamp REPORTAGE CAPA & TARO on the backs of their photographs. Taro is his ideal—an equal, determined, sharing the same passions and appetite for adventure and photography.

  But what about Taro? While Taro is glad for Capa’s success, it seems she may be starting to pull away. Or perhaps she is asserting her independence and sees this as her moment to make her own mark, just as Capa did in his November coverage of Madrid. After all, she is the career girl who wastes no time in getting what she wants.